Lesson 3 of 5 – Food

THE PROJECT

This lesson plan features the film and book from the project, No Impact Man, which follows a family in New York City as they examine how they live, exchange old habits for more environmentally-friendly ones, and discover in the process that such changes actually make them happier and healthier. The lesson also incorporates Web site resources that build on themes that emerge from the family’s experiences. Educators can use this lesson to help students explore how their food choices affect the environment and our quality of life. This lesson was produced with assistance from our partner Eat Well Guide.

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this lesson, students will:

Assess their last meal based on freshness, nutritional value, and how the food was packaged.

Develop a list of strategies for reducing food-related trash.

Use viewing skills and strategies to understand and interpret a video clip.

Identify the benefits of eating seasonally and locally.

Create and reflect on a plan for one meal that includes only food that is seasonal, local, and unpackaged.

GRADE LEVELS

6-12

RELATED SUBJECT AREAS

MATERIALS

Equipment for showing the entire class an online video clip

Student access to the Internet

Book excerpt begins on p. 128 with, “And so, in those first cold January…”and ends on p. 130 with, “What were we thinking all this time?” To access this book passage please find the link to it in the e-mail you received when
you registered. If you have lost this e-mail please go here to register again.

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ESTIMATED TIME NEEDED

One 50-minute class period

FEATURED VIDEO CLIP

“Eliminating Trash” (length: 2:06): The clip begins at 20:07 with the Beavan family walking out of a building and ends at 22:13 when Colin says, “This is our combined trash for a week.”

To access this video clip, please find the link to it in the e-mail you received when you registered.

ACTIVITY

1. Display the following instructions and have students complete the exercise as a warm-up activity:

Write down everything you ate and drank at your last meal. Circle the foods that have been processed in some way. Next to each item, list details about the packaging it came in. What value did the packaging add? Is that packaging recyclable? What do you think will happen to the packaging that was thrown away?

2. Invite some of the students to share what they’ve written. Discuss:

Did members of the class eat more processed food or food made from fresh ingredients?

How healthy do students think the meal was?

Why did students choose to eat the food that they did? (Possible answers: Needed something fast and easy, my mother made it for me, I love salads, etc.)

How do our systems for obtaining food affect our choices about what we eat?

What types of food had the most packaging?

What happened to the packaging when the meal was over?

3. Explain that in 2006, food packaging in the U.S. was responsible for about 50 million tons of garbage. That’s 20 percent of all our trash! (Source: Environmental Protection Agency) Often, our food-related trash comes from take out containers that are only used for a few minutes before being thrown away. How can our choices about what we eat both increase our health and reduce the amount of trash we generate at each meal? Brainstorm a class list of possible strategies.

4. Tell students that a man named Colin Beavan and his family in New York City decided that they were going to figure out as many ways as they could to reduce the trash that they generate – including minimizing the amount of packaging in their food. Colin blogged about what his family learned. Show the video clip for this lesson and ask students to listen carefully for food-related trash-reduction strategies that are not on their class list. Then, update the class list with any new ideas that were identified.

5. Explain that the Beavans also learned that the average distance that food travels to an American’s plate is 1,500 miles (Source: John Hendrickson, “Energy use in the U.S. Food System: A Summary of existing research and analysis”). That means food has to be picked long before its peak ripeness, so it isn’t as fresh and flavorful. Also, all that transporting of food uses fossil fuels and creates pollution. They also learned that buying foods grown locally helps the local economy. So they eat only seasonal foods that were grown within 250 miles of their home. For them, this meant shopping at the local Farmer’s Market, changing their eating habits, and learning new ways to prepare food. Then, read the brief book excerpt for this lesson.

6. Discuss:

In what ways could the Beavan’s choice to eat locally and seasonally help the environment, the local economy, and their health?

What other benefits did they experience?

What were the negative aspects of the experience?

What do students find the most appealing and/or unappealing about the idea of eating locally and seasonally?

Is shipping food long distances a necessity of modern life? Why or why not?

How can the Beavans have a greater variety of foods next winter and still keep their commitment to eating locally and seasonally? (Preserve food, etc.)

7. Challenge students to create a plan for one meal that includes only food that is seasonal, local, and unpackaged. The provided Meal Plan Organizer walks students through this process and lists helpful Web sites, such as the Eat Well Guide— a free online directory of where to find fresh, locally-grown, and sustainable food. Students can complete this assignment for homework.

Model seasonal and local eating. During this lesson, provide a delicious snack for students made exclusively from local and seasonal ingredients. Explain where all the ingredients were produced and purchased and, if applicable, provide a recipe for how to prepare the snack. As an alternative, engage parent volunteers to each provide a local and seasonal snack for a class buffet. Have parents take turns explaining the details of the snacks.

Invite a local farmer to come speak to the class about his or her farming practices and where and how items produced on the farm are sold. Prepare for this visit by asking students to develop questions for the farmer and submit them to you. Select questions that best address your curriculum objectives and send them to the farmer in advance to help focus his or her remarks. Or pose the questions to the farmer during class in an interview format so you can better control time and the topics addressed. Have students send the farmer a thank you note after the visit.

Challenge the class to identify the food product with the most unnecessary packaging. To identify candidates, students could save their trash from an already-purchased item or take pictures of products with excessive packaging to share with the class. (Instruct students not to buy products with excessive packaging for the purpose of this assignment!) Have students share the products in small groups and then choose a group “winner” for product with the most unnecessary packaging. Product “finalists” from each group can be put to a class vote to determine which has the most unnecessary packaging. Have students write letters to the company that produced this product to encourage more eco-friendly packaging practices.

Help others make more eco-friendly food choices. Have students develop a multimedia outreach campaign that shares information from some of these guides with members of the school and/or community:

Plant a class garden. Before getting started, work with your principal and parents association to locate an appropriate location. If one isn’t available, some alternatives are planting a windowsill garden or planting herbs, tomatoes, or peas in pots outside (using reusable cages for support). Class gardens lend themselves to lessons on weather, plant science, economics, mathematics, history, art, and writing. For ideas, see the classroom activities provided by The Edible Schoolyard, including suggestions on growing corn, making a Neolithic fruit salad, and the mathematics of rhubarb jam.

Teach students the art of composting. Have the class first research the benefits of composting. Then, set up a compost bin near your classroom or provide extra credit for students who set one up at home and blog or journal about their experience. The University of Nebraska providesinstructions for composting. Alternatively,build and maintain a worm compost bin like students saw the Beavans do in the video clip. Wisconsin State University explains how.

Read examples of what schools are doing around the country to teach children how food choices can affect the health of a community, environment, and economy. This site also explains how to apply for funding to begin a similar program at your school.

Sustainable Table is a program that works to educate consumers and increase demand for sustainable, local food through awareness campaigns, promotional events and by offering viable solutions to the factory farm problem. This comprehensive section provides handouts and free presentation kits on many of the issues associated with our food system, including hormones, additives, organic farming, reasons to buy sustainable, animal welfare, food safety, pesticides and more.

This Michael Pollan essay spells out healthy eating in these words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan also describes what’s wrong with America’s eating culture, and how we can eat foods with greater nutrition.

STANDARDS

These standards are drawn from “Content Knowledge,” a compilation of content standards and benchmarks for K-12 curriculum by McRel (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning).

Language Arts, Standard 10: Understands the characteristics and components of the media.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cari Ladd, M.Ed., is an educational writer with a background in secondary education and media development. Previously, she served as PBS Interactive’s Director of Education, overseeing the development of curricular resources tied to PBS programs, the PBS TeacherSource Web site (now PBS Teachers), and online teacher professional development services. She has also taught in Maryland and Northern Virginia.

ABOUT NO IMPACT MAN

This lesson is inspired by the work of Colin Beavan (aka “No Impact Man”), who got tired of listening to himself complain about the world without ever actually doing anything about it. So in November 2006, he launched his year-long “No Impact Man” experiment in which he, his wife, his two-year-old daughter and their dog attempted to live in the middle of New York City with as little environmental impact as possible. They tried to adopt new everyday habits that would be less harmful to the planet, and discovered in the process that such changes also make them happier and healthier. Along the way, Beavan blogged about his adventures and attracted broad public attention to environmental issues, including those related food, consumption, water, energy, and transportation. Beavan’s experiment in lifestyle redesign is the subject of his No Impact Manbook and a Sundance-selected documentary by independent film producers Laura Gabbert and Eden Wurmfeld.

ABOUT EAT WELL GUIDE

The Eat Well Guide® is a free online directory for anyone in search of fresh, locally grown and sustainably produced food in the United States and Canada. Eat Well’s thousands of listings include family farms, restaurants, farmers’ markets, grocery stores, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, U-pick orchards and more. Users can search by location, keyword, category or product to find good food, download customized guides, or plan a trip with the innovative mapping tool, Eat Well Everywhere. Eat Well is also home to The Green Fork blog and the free educational booklet Cultivating the Web: High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement. Together with the enterprising spirits of independent farmers, locally owned businesses and partner organizations, the Eat Well Guide’s collaborative technology harnesses the power of the web to effect social, environmental and economic change, and maps the route to a more sustainable food system.